Friday, November 20

Friday Andy Rooney Impressions

(Star photo, Matt Dial) One: Don't you have a relative who employs the Tactical Don't-Ever-Say-Anything-Even-Remotely-Serious-Around-Me Open-Mouthed Gesture of Low-IQ Geniality every time her picture is snapped? And would you vote for her to run anything? And two: it's a book signing. Really professional, there, turning up encumbered.

• Six. That's the number of separate reports Channel 8 had on last evening's Palin book-signing event in 38 minutes. Which is the point where I paused dinner preparations long enough to go to the living room and turn it off. Lead fucking story, then a toss to the remote, then a recap of the lead story twenty minutes in, another toss, then two tosses as it led off the second half hour, including one where "political reporter" Jim Shella told us the full-screen shot of as much of her bus as they could get showed the actual door where she, or She, would actually be exiting to actually walk among us.

The signing took place in Noblesville, which is the county seat of Hamilton county, the frozen engine block of Cash-for-Clunkers Republicanism, and far from the snooty, literate, but equally Republican exoburbias on the Marion county line. Let's just say that Noblesville does not have a reputation as an arts center. Let's just say that unless your conversation is regularly peppered with "holler" and "shucks," eachused as both a noun and a verb, the only reason you'd ever go to Noblesville is that you were arrested in one of the few areas left which the strip mall towns haven't annexed. Let's just say that Palin's advance team made an extraordinarily prescient choice.

• Lugar, one of two Indiana Senators regularly referred to as "Dick", expressed embarrassment over the incident, which is something he's never done about cashing thirty-years worth of government checks while campaigning for President, campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, and helping Indiana remain the only solid Red state that regularly watches its Federal tax monies go somewhere else. This was also more than what was expressed by Pastor Bob Parker when this got him noticed:

(Terre Haute Tribune-Star photo, Bob Poynter)

The use of the word “Allah” in the sign may seem to challenge Islam, but Pastor Bob Parker of Bible Baptist Center at 25th Street and Margaret Avenue said the intent was not derogatory.

“People are making it a political statement,” said Parker when asked about the meaning of the sign’s statement. “It just means the founder of Christianity still lives,” Parker said.

Now, as might be imagined, no one in the story, or anywhere else so far as we know, is "making it a political statement"; the objections raised in the article were religious. But what really raised this to the level of, well, Noblesvillian Hoosieritude followed.

He pointed out that the statement about Allah did not have a question mark behind it, so he did not think it was an attack. However, Parker also said the church does not have punctuation lettering for the sign.

I won't even begin to try to explain the first part. But five bucks says they've got at least four exclamation points somewhere.

• Via My Poor Wife, the bi-monthly media excitement over the bi-monthly concert appearance of Miley Cyrus earlier this week was dimmed when she dressed like a strumpet. Or so it seemed to the last remaining excessive hair-gel victim at local Fox affiliate 59's morning news desk. She took her six-year-old daughter to the corporate hoe-down (on a school night) and found Cyrus' attire entirely inappropriate for the budding incontinent consumer of disposable crap she's trying to bring up sensibly, god damn it. This, by the way, is the last survivor of 59's ill-considered attempt, a few years back, to turn its morning news program into a sort of Bob and Tom Show, but with more frat-boy smirkiness and less funny jokes. The program, so far as I can tell, was centered around the Booty Cam, which would periodically zoom in on someone's ass, then zoom in and out real quick in the universal non-verbal sign of hilarity. Female asses, I mean; it's not like they were immoral about it or anything.

Presumably, being a conscientious mother an' all, she didn't let the nanny let her daughter watch that sort of filth.

FYI, it was not so very long ago that an attempt at State Slogan here in Ioway was "Iowa; a state of mind." Sorta making it fucking official. But I believe it lost out to "Iowa; you make me smile." Seriously.